


sunsetter

by megalopunny



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:16:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23736724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/megalopunny/pseuds/megalopunny
Summary: They’re twins, born less than two minutes apart in late July, when the California heat warps the air and makes mirages on the highways.hs au, unhappy ending, sorry.
Relationships: Riku/Sora (Kingdom Hearts), Roxas & Sora (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26





	sunsetter

They’re twins, born less than two minutes apart in late July, when the California heat warps the air and makes mirages on the highways. People say they’re identical, but Sora knows Roxas’s nose is smaller, Roxas is left handed, and he has a mole by his left eye. Sora’s mole is by his mouth, on the right. Like a beauty mark, he likes to joke. Like Marilyn Monroe. They both favor their father, but Sora's skin is brown, while Roxas's is golden, like the sunset. They’re a funhouse mirror of each other. 

Privately, they like that no one can tell them apart. They don’t want to be apart, anyway. For years, they don’t play with other kids. They don’t even like to talk to other kids. Sometimes, on the playground, they’ll answer other kids in a made up language only they know, to make them go away. 

“We weren’t supposed to be split apart,” Roxas whispers once, in bed. Him and Sora are hidden under the sheets, reading by flashlight. “That’s why I'm left-handed and you’re not. We used to be one person, and then we split into two. Other twins split early on, but not us. We waited too long. Any longer and we would’ve been conjoined.”

Sora grimaces at the pictures in the book. 

“They would’ve had to cut us apart!” 

“Sora, shh! Mom’ll hear us!” 

In the end, it’s their laughter that gives them away. Their mom puts Roxas back in his own bed. 

They don’t learn to make other friends until they start school. Quietly, their family is relieved. 

Growing up, they don’t have much. They have a single mother, and a small house, but there’s a tree outside that covers it, probably hundreds of years old. They build a treehouse in it one summer, almost all by themselves, and call it their crow’s nest. They can just see the ocean from the top, a thin band of blue on the horizon. They talk about running away, becoming pirates, sailing around and seeing the world. 

“And we’d never come back!” Roxas likes to say. 

“Never?” 

Sora doesn’t like _never_. He’d miss their mom too much. The neighbor’s dog. All their friends at school. 

“I wouldn’t,” Roxas always answers, which Sora thinks is weird, because Roxas does better in school than him. It’s Roxas that gets the best grades and places in spelling bees and ends up on the honor roll. Sora doesn’t get math, and science confuses him too. If anything, a C student like him should be the one to be eager to leave school behind forever. 

At the end of middle school, Roxas’s grades start to drop. No one thinks much of it when he goes from an exceptional student to an average one. A lot of students have trouble with algebra. Everyone was sure he’d catch up, but he never does. He turns quiet, sullen. He doesn’t out and quit his school’s soccer team - instead he stops showing up all together. Still, he graduates, and Sora watches him walk to the podium to accept his diploma with his head down. 

It’s during summer vacation that Sora starts to lose him. 

First, Roxas bleaches his hair. He does it at home, by himself, and the result isn’t platinum, but a warm, buttery yellow. Still, he seems happy with it, even if Sora thinks it looks dumb. He didn’t even tell Sora beforehand. Now they don’t match anymore. 

Roxas starts going out more, which wouldn’t be a big deal, but Sora finds out from his friends that he hasn’t been hanging out with them either. It seems to everyone like he’s just disappeared. 

Sora finds Roxas’s friends at one of their usual spots, the benches on the top of the hill at the edge of town. It’s the best place to watch the sunset. From there, they can look out over the town, over the ocean, and watch the trains disappear down the tracks. Once, Roxas had said that he wanted to hitch a ride on one of them, wait for a freight car to be left open and hop on. _We could ride away from this shitty town forever._ It’s warm, but the thought still makes Sora shiver. At least he still comes home at night. At least he has that. For now. 

“Hey,” Sora says, uneasy. “Have you guys seen Roxas around?” 

“It's been a while,” Hayner says, pulling on a loose thread from his shorts. He won’t look up at Sora. “I guess he’s pissed off about something.” 

“I don't think so,” Pence says. “He would’ve told you to your face if you pissed him off.” 

Hayner flinches. “So? Then what’s he doing?” 

Pence shrugs, looking down. “I figured you’d know, Sora.”

“He'll come around,” Olette says. She looks more sure than she sounds. “Whatever he’s going through, he just needs time. Although… it would be better if he talked to someone about it. Then maybe we could help.” 

“Yeah,” Sora sighs. “I think so too.”

He walks alone down the hill as the streetlights’ timer comes on, even though there’s still some sun left. His bike is left in the grass where he tossed it, and Sora gets on and starts the ride home. He daydreams about running into Roxas on the way, and they could hang out again, like they used to. He doesn’t know what happened. Maybe Hayner did do something wrong. Or maybe Sora himself did. Maybe Roxas finally got sick of him. Maybe he’s too immature, and Roxas doesn’t want to be friends with his weird brother that still watches disney movies and cartoons and can’t ride a skateboard. His bike even still has a basket. 

When he gets home, he locks his bike up in the garage, and climbs up the ladder to the treehouse. With a camping lantern and a blanket, he waits for his brother to come back. He’s asleep by the time he hears Roxas’s skateboard coming down the street. Sora almost calls out to him, but he hesitates. Roxas’s hair is cut short. It wasn’t like that this morning. Their matching mops of messy curls are gone now. 

And he’s smoking. 

Sora watches as Roxas takes a last puff on his cigarette before stamping it out in the gutter. With his skateboard and his cigarette, his ripped jeans and his hair, short on the sides but longer on top, he looks… cool. And Sora is suddenly very aware that his brother is becoming someone else, someone that Sora isn’t. 

Sora tries to keep busy through summer vacation. He has his own friends, and if he’s busy enough, and with them enough, he doesn’t think about his brother as much. His friends are like him - rowdy, a little dorky, a little immature. Often, he spends nights at Riku’s house, and Kairi, the mayor’s daughter, sneaks out and joins them. They play a lot of video games and stay up late to watch horror movies and Austin City Limits and Sora does his best to not think about how it used to be him and Roxas doing stuff like that. 

When they start high school, the twins are put in separate classes for every period. Sora hoped this would be the chance to reconnect with Roxas, but now he's lost. They see each other even less than before. 

One night, when they're alone in their room and Sora is ignoring his history homework, he tries to talk to him again. It's probably the dozenth time. Roxas isn't doing anything, anyway, definitely not his own homework, but instead boredly shopping on his laptop. 

“I miss you,” Sora says, and immediately flushes red, because that was such a stupid thing to say, why would he start with that? “I-I just mean, you’re busy a lot now. We never hang out anymore.” 

This time, Roxas doesn’t shrug him off or tell him not to worry so much. Somehow, this time, he’s caught off guard. His wide eyes, his furrowed brows, the noise of hesitation before he answers, and then doesn't. 

“Talk to me,” Sora says, pleads. “Let me help.” 

And Roxas nods. 

“I just… I hate it here. I can’t wait until we can leave. It’s like… death being here. This shitty town kills everyone in it.” 

Sora must look confused, because Roxas stops there, shaking his head. 

“There’s nothing here. What are we gonna become? It’s not like we’re trust fund kids, Sora. We’re not gonna get to go to college far away. Maybe not even at all. We’ll stay here and get jobs as baggers at the grocery store and maybe if we’re lucky, one day, we’ll get to be assistant manager or something. It’s death, Sora. Being born and living and dying in this town, when there's so much more out there. When we’re older, we can buy a car, and we’ll pack it all up and drive away. We’ll go see the whole world! We won’t stop til we’re all the way in Beijing or Brazil or something.” 

“As long as I’m coming with you,” Sora says, forcing a smile. 

“Duh,” Roxas scoffs. “Who else am I gonna go with?” 

Like they’re kids again, they sleep together in the same bed, and maybe Sora holds on too tight, because the next day, Roxas is gone again. 

And this time it stays that way. 

Late in the fall, Sora and Riku walk home from school together. Kairi had been off sick for most of the week, so it’s been just them. They stop at the park, empty in the cold and the early sunset dark. They sit on the swings. Riku’s legs seem like they’re getting longer every day. He kicks a gulley under the swings just so his feet won’t scrape the ground on the way down. His face is red, windburnt. Sora is red, too, but not from the cold. 

He likes being alone with Riku, and at the very bottom of his heart, the part of him that’s brave and unafraid of the consequences, he knows why. 

Sora kisses him there, in the dark, not out of bravery but on impulse. Because, right then, he couldn’t have done anything else. It’s sweet, and it’s soft, and when Riku puts his hand on Sora’s back and holds him, he thinks it’s perfect. 

They hold hands the rest of the way home, up to Sora's door. He doesn’t kiss Riku again, here out in the glow of the porch light. “Tomorrow,” Sora tells him, elated. 

Upstairs, Roxas is there, already home, and Sora dares to think that maybe just this once he left his brother waiting instead. He wants to tell him, of course. This is huge. His first kiss, and it was everything he could have dreamed of. 

“You’re never gonna guess what just happened!” Sora says, still flushed, still grinning. 

Roxas is changing into his pajamas. In the glow of Sora’s night light, he can just make out marks on Roxas’s neck. His breath catches in his throat. They’re not bruises. He’s not stupid. He knows what he sees, and he knows he saw one on Roxas’s chest too. 

“What?” Roxas answers, like his patience is wearing thin. 

Sora doesn’t know what to say. His kiss seems so small now, like nothing at all. So what if he held a boy’s hand on the way home? Haven’t most other kids already had their first kiss by 15? He thinks he read that in a magazine once. What does that matter, compared to whatever Roxas is doing? 

“It… it’s a secret!” Sora fakes a grin, and immediately kicks his shoes off to hide in bed. 

“Ugh,” Roxas groans. “Seriously? A secret? How old are you? Either tell me or don’t.” 

Sora’s chest is cold. He nods, mutters, “Okay.” 

Roxas and their mom fight a lot now. She says he’s ungrateful, disobedient, ruining everything she’s worked for. Out all night, doing God knows what. He’s throwing away his education. Sora agrees, a little. Roxas is behind in most of his classes. The day Sora started bringing better marks than him was when he knew they’d crossed a line. 

It only sends him away more, leaving Sora trapped alone with their mom. 

She tells him things she shouldn’t, about how tired she is from working. That some days she doesn’t know if it’s worth it. That she wishes his dad was still around. Sora never knows what to say. He tries his best to stay positive, tells her she needs to keep trying and that things will be better, Roxas will get better and once they graduate and get jobs, they can take care of her instead. 

“I wish I could be as hopeful as you,” she tells him. 

One night, she looks at him, glassy eyed, and sighs over how much he looks like his father. It’s her fault he died, she tells him. She tells him everything. Sora never needed to know that much about the accident. Sora never needed to know what she did and didn’t do. Now he does, and he can’t forget.

He leaves that night, in the winter rain, in nothing warmer than a hoodie. By the time he gets to Riku’s house, he’s soaked through, freezing cold, too cold to feel anything else. He climbs up the garden shed to Riku’s window, knocks, and even though it’s past midnight and he’s dripping wet, Riku lets him in. 

“What happened?” He asks, of course, and Sora knew before he got here that he’d never be able to answer that. 

Sora shakes his head, standing tightly wound in Riku’s big bedroom. He’s lost. All the words die in his throat so he swallows them down and lets Riku put him in the shower to warm up. His wet clothes pile up on the tile floor. Of course Riku has his own bathroom, Sora thinks. He’s never had to share a room with anyone. He’ll probably go away to college, maybe all the way to the east coast. Sora watches the water and soap swirl down the drain. He’ll leave too. Even Kairi. They’ll all leave him behind. 

Sora’s feet move on their own, out of the bathroom, into Riku’s room, still undressed. He finds Riku in bed, and leans over to kiss him. It’s desperate, forceful. Riku pulls back, red, eyebrows furrowed tight.

“What’s going on? Are you okay?”

Sora doesn’t know how to answer that. Obviously not, he thinks, but nods instead. “I’m fine.” He smiles; it doesn’t reach his eyes. “I was just thinking about you in there. Don’t you think about me like that?” 

“Yeah, but-” Riku pauses, like he’s caught off guard by Sora being so direct. 

“So? What’s the problem?” It’s funny, Sora thinks, how hard Riku is working to keep his eyes from looking down. He wishes he wouldn’t try so hard. 

“What’s the problem?” Riku repeats, incredulous. “All of this! You show up in the middle of the night, looking like a runaway, you won’t tell me what’s going on…” He sits up, back against the headboard. “I mean, is Roxas okay? Is your mom okay? Did something happen?” 

Sora laughs, humorless. “I just wanted to see you.” 

Riku still hesitates. 

“It's okay,” Sora says, quiet. “I want to.” And he slips onto Riku’s lap, kissing him silent.

It’s not right. Riku never says no, or stops him, but it’s still all wrong. Sora didn’t know it would hurt so much. He leaves early the next morning, going home only after he knows his mom has left for work, and even then only to get his bike from the garage. He takes the basket off it, throws it in the trash. 

He spends the day on the cold, empty beach alone, small in Riku’s borrowed clothes. 

Throughout the day, he gets a flurry of texts: from Riku (ignored), his mom (answered; he slept over at Riku’s house and he’ll be back after school), Kairi (asking why he wasn’t at school, answered with a lie about a stomach ache from too much candy), and, finally, Roxas. 

“Where are you?”

Sora stares at it for a long time. Of course his brother still cares, he thinks, feeling dumb and foolish. It’s natural he’d be worried about him. But it’s been so long; Sora has been the worrier, the one to send texts after midnight asking when Roxas will finally be home, the one to sit up half the night waiting. 

He does what Roxas does. He ignores him. 

He ignores that text, the next five, the two calls. 

During his hours there, he thinks about how tired he’s become. How he feels it in his bones. What he wouldn’t give for things to be normal again, and he and Roxas could go back to being friends again, and Riku and Kairi, and Roxas’s friends too. Everything could be like that one summer day before seventh grade when they all went to mcdonalds and the dollar store and bought cheap toys to ruin, Chinese knockoff nerfs and styrofoam planes, and broke them all playing in the park. 

Watching the give and pull of the water on the shore, Sora thinks, _oh well_. 

_Oh well_ , with something thick and somber pooling in his gut. Those days aren’t only gone: they barely ever existed at all. 

There’s a noise behind him, shoes trudging through dry sand. He hears Roxas shouting over the waves. 

“You asshole!” 

Sora shuffles to his feet, his breath uneven. 

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you! You can’t pick up your fucking phone? I thought--” 

“What did you think?” Sora doesn’t sound like himself - cold, accusing. Roxas hesitates. “Did you think something happened to me? Did you think I got hurt or ran away?” 

“I don’t know!” Roxas backtracks. “You were just-- gone!” 

“How does it feel?” 

Silences stretches between them. His whole face is hot. He’s never been an angry person, and he wears it awkwardly, with shaking hands. Sora knows he’s crying, but he can’t stop. 

“What.” Roxas hardly even asks. Sora knows that voice. Roxas only sounds like that just before he explodes. Barely contained rage. But Sora doesn’t back down. 

“I said, how does it feel?”

“What the fuck do you-- is this a joke to you? I’ve been looking for you all day! I’ve looked everywhere!”

Shame fills Sora’s chest, but, deeper, something else. He didn’t think Roxas cared about him anymore. Maybe it’s just relief. 

“Last night,” Sora says, quiet, “Riku and I had sex.” He thought he’d be proud to say it. Everyone else is always proud and excited. He just feels ashamed. The way he says it makes it sound like a confession of some transgression. 

Roxas doesn’t seem to know how to react. He almost says a few things, but he always stops, and finally, settles on groaning, sighing, “I’ve always fucking hated him.” In the last of the sunlight, he can see the marks on Sora’s neck, the ones Sora had insisted Riku leave. Now, Roxas understands. For a long time, he’s quiet.

“I never wanted you to be like me.” 

It hits Sora through his chest. 

“You’re not… like this. You’re better. You’ve always been better. I’m just…” And he stops again. “Some days, all I can think about is hanging myself. It’s so fucking hard, Sora. I know I’m really gonna do it one day, if we don’t get out of here. You’re the only hope left for me.” 

The waves behind him rush up, deafening him, or maybe that’s just the ringing in his ears.

“I always wanted to be like you.” 

In the dark, Sora laughs, clutching his chest. 

No one is surprised when Roxas finally disappears for good. 

In the days since they fought, Sora and Roxas have kept an uncomfortable silence between them. Neither one of them talk much to their mother. Neither one of them like to be home much anymore. Still, when Sora wakes up one morning and sees the bed next to him empty, his chest goes cold. Roxas came home last night, around two a.m., and got in bed. Sora is sure. His bare feet are cold on the stairs as he runs down, rips the door open. The shade of their tree on the lawn shelters the overnight frost, which has already melted everywhere else in the sun. Roxas left nothing but a set of footprints through the frost. Sora puts his bare foot in the print. A perfect fit. Like Cinderella, he thinks, laughs, and cries and cries and cries. 

This had always been his favorite time of year. The big tree fills out from its winter skeleton, creating the shade underneath with new leaves, like a world reborn. In the summer, it was his favorite place to read, or nap, or play games. He knows the shadow it makes in the summer will never call him again. 

Sora already knows, in the place inside him that’s Roxas, his twin, his mirror. He knows he’s gone. He doesn’t need to check their closet, but he does. He doesn’t need to look for Roxas’s backpack, but he does. He already knows. 

Sora puts together a story in his head from the things his brother took, and what he left behind. Favorite clothes are gone, a spare pair of sneakers, his skateboard, some of their mom’s jewelry. But his childhood Tigger plush (to match Sora’s Pooh Bear) is still in bed. There’s a half empty box of cigarettes under the bed. Sora pockets those. 

Then he wakes his mom up. 

There’s an expectation on Sora now: he has to be okay. After all, he’s always been okay. Their mom used to joke with him about how well adjusted he was, despite all of the struggles they’ve had. Sora wasn’t like other kids with one parent. He was sweet and well behaved and never once got into a fight with anyone. When he did get in trouble at school, it was only ever for talking in class. It seemed to everyone like losing his dad so young didn’t bother him at all. So what was this? Just another bump in the road. If anyone could get over losing a brother, too, it would obviously be Sora, who would always be happy and optimistic. 

He tries his best. 

Over the summer, he turns sixteen alone. 

He tries not to let it bother him. He tries to be excited for presents, and being the center of attention for once, rather than having to share the spotlight, and the hugeness of being sixteen finally. It doesn’t last. 

His mother buys him a new Xbox. They shouldn’t be able to afford that. The realization hits later that night, in his half empty room: now his mom is only supporting one son. Now they can afford nicer things. He can’t bear to take the plastic off his new games. 

At school, Sora changes. To avoid going home, he joins a handful of different clubs and even joins a few study groups for his weak subjects. He takes guitar lessons on weekends. 

He makes sure he’s never home before nine. It feels wrong to be in what used to be their room alone. Roxas’s bed is still there, fixed, cleaner and neater than it should be. There’s something uncanny about their space now. Sora always imagines he’ll come home one day and find the bed a mess, and Roxas’s shoes on the floor, his pillows on the floor, comics and crumbs lost in the blankets. He knows, though, that his brother is never coming back. He’s tried to tell their mom that. He wants Roxas’s bed packed away. He doesn’t want to see his stuff ever again. Their mom calls him heartless, but he knows he’s right. 

On days like that, when he misses Roxas too much to stand, Sora smokes one of his cigarettes. He doesn’t really inhale, and the part of him that’s Roxas mocks him for that, calls him a baby. It’s almost like having his brother back for a few minutes. The smell is a comfort. Roxas always smelled a little like smoke when he’d come home late. It settled in the bedding. 

The pack inevitably empties and Sora, not even sixteen and a half, finds himself confessing his habit to Riku, who recently turned eighteen. 

“You’re smoking now?” Riku asks, sighing, like this is the last straw in a pile Sora has built up over the last few months. 

“Just a little!” Sora says. “Just sometimes.” 

Riku doesn’t look convinced. 

“It’s just… these are the ones Roxas used to smoke. Sometimes,” and Sora stops, gathering himself. “Sometimes I just wanna remember him.” 

There it is, laid bare. Sora can’t look up from the floor, flushed, ashamed, waiting for Riku’s lecture. It’s weird, it’s more than a little unhealthy in more ways than he can believe, right? But when Riku just says, “Alright,” quietly, resigned, Sora nearly cries. He laughs instead, hollow. 

Riku drives him to the next town over, so no one they know will see them. In the car, Sora gives him the cash and tells him the brand, and Riku accepts it all without question. Against his better judgement, Sora follows him into the first dumpy corner store they find. Riku pulls his ID out of his wallet, asks for the right brand. The clerk, aging, grey, fat, looks them over with a strange look. 

“Is this all you art school kids know how to smoke? Why don’t you try a real cigarette instead of this fag shit?” 

Riku, somehow, doesn’t say anything, but the shame burns hot in Sora’s face, in his chest. Riku pays for two packs, and they leave together, silent. The silence stretches out the whole ride home. It’s late autumn now, and the night cold is freezing. Sora wants to find some warmth in Riku’s arms, fill some hole left in him, spend the night, but he’s dropped off at his own door. Without a kiss, with just a terse, “Bye,” Riku drives away without him. 

Riku breaks up with Sora the next day. 

Sora doesn’t take it well. He breaks down there in the empty classroom, on his knees on the dirty floor. Riku finally has to leave him there alone as Sora’s world collapses around him. 

In spring, Riku gets accepted to his second choice college, far away on the east coast, leaving just like Sora always knew he would. Sora and Kairi are the same age, and will start senior year together, but what about after that? She’s just gonna leave too, probably somewhere even further away. She’s the daughter of the mayor, after all, and neither she nor Riku ever struggled for money the way Sora and his family did. He’ll stay here and rot like Roxas always said they would. 

Sora needs to know where his brother went. He needs to be there too. 

He skips school again, leaving early one day on the first bus north. He wonders, heart aching, what it would be like to skip his stop and just keep going, get off only at the terminal and pick another bus from there randomly, eenie-meenie. Where would he end up? How long would he live with just his packed lunch in his backpack? How long would it take for him to miss home? The automated voice calls out his stop and Sora gets off, disappointed with himself. He’s a coward. 

He walks onto the campus of the art school and feels like an intruder. He has excuses piled up: he’s on a tour, he’s thinking of applying next year, he’s visiting family. Sora is sure he has a neon sign on his head that says “high schooler.” It doesn’t help that he’s wandering around like he’s lost. He barely even knows what he’s looking for. Some kids smoking Roxas’s brand of cigarettes? That could be anyone. Coming here was stupid, he knows, but he has no other clues. 

He flops down on the grass, exhausted, boneless, lost. 

“Roxas?” 

It’s a girl’s voice. Sora shoots straight up, eyes wide, heart beating out of his chest. A tall girl with blue dyed hair is leaning over him. For a moment, Sora only blinks dumbly.

“No,” he says finally, “he’s my brother.” 

The girl stands up straight. She can’t hide her disappointment. “That’s right,” she says, wistful, “He did say he had a little brother.” 

Sora scowls. _‘I’m older! And besides, we’re twins! He lied to you! He was just fifteen, a dumbass kid, just like me!’_ He wants to say all this, but he doesn’t, and just nods, swallowing down his hurt feelings. 

“Is he here?” She stole his question. 

“No,” Sora says, uneasy. Does she not know anything either? “I thought… I thought his friends would know where he was.” 

Finally the realization seems to hit the girl, because she suddenly looks sad, but not just sad - concerned. 

“He used to hang around with my friend Lea. I think they were seeing each other. But Lea dropped out last year. None of us have been able to get ahold of him. I thought Roxas stopped coming by because Lea wasn’t here anymore, but…”

“They ran away together,” Sora finishes her thought, and she nods. 

“So you don’t know anything at all?” There’s a desperation in his voice. This is really it. The end of the road. 

“Nothing,” the girl says. “Lea just left one day. We didn’t really know anything about him at all, so we couldn’t find him. He never talked about his family or where he was from. Somewhere out of state, as if that helps anything.” 

“Hey! Aqua!” Some people are yelling and waving the girl over. A pretty blonde girl and a tall guy with long brown hair. 

“Sorry. Those are my friends,” she says to Sora, and turns towards them like she’s about to leave, but she stops herself. “You could come hang out with us for a while if you want.” 

He wants to say yes, insert himself into his brother’s old life, become friends with his friends, yes, please, I want to be a part of him again, I want to have friends again, I want people to want me again - but that’s the problem. They don’t really want him. She’s just being polite, and Sora knows it, so he declines, and sits there in the grass, clutching Roxas’s cigarette box so hard it crumples in his hand. 

“Ugh. Those were Lea's favorite,” Aqua tells him. “You know, they’re not even made by real Indians. The whole thing’s a scam.” 

Sora looks down at the native american on the box, proudly displaying his headdress. He laughs. It figures. 

Like always, Sora wakes up in the morning. Like always, he smiles and says good morning to his mom, and goes to school, and then to clubs, and then to practice. Even though he’s hollow inside, spring goes on. The big tree on his lawn grows buds, then leaves, and the shade reappears under it, like always. Sora talks to his friends less and less, until they stop inviting him out. What’s the point, when he just turns everything down anyway? 

“Hey,” Riku announces himself one day, talking to Sora for the first time since they broke up over the fall. “This came for you in the mail today.” Sora must look perplexed, because Riku keeps explaining. “I guess he didn’t want your mom to see it.” 

It’s a postcard. Covered in bushels of fat peaches, the card proudly reads, “Georgia: a peachy place to be.” He flips it over. 

“Sora,” it says, in Roxas’s clean handwriting, and that’s all he needs to see before he’s crying, there in class, there in front of Riku, who came down the hall just to find him, with Kairi and Selphie and Tidus and the teacher and all of the kids who have started to pick on him. He’s on his feet before he knows it, sneakers squeaking on the floor as he runs out of the classroom. 

Locked in a bathroom stall, he reads the postcard with shaking hands, shaky breaths. 

“Sora. I’m okay. Sorry it took so long to let you know. Miss you.” 

There’s no return address. 

When he gets home, he hides it under his mattress and dreams all night about peaches, and pecan pies, and ghosts haunting old plantations. 

Riku hands him another postcard next week. A pretty night scene over the arch in St. Louis. 

“Hey Sora,” it starts, and he keeps himself together this time. “I don’t like it here. Glad you’re still there. I hope you’re happy.” 

The next card takes two weeks to show up, and Riku hands it off to him without any conversation as he passes by in the hallway. This one is from New Orleans, which declares itself here “the city of the dead” atop a photo of the cemetery. Sora decides this one is his favorite. 

“Sorry,” it reads. “I bought a bunch of these while we were on the road and i’m just sending them out now. It must look like I'm teleporting. That would be easier. Gas isn’t that cheap. Miss you.” 

Sora’s anchor is torn away. Roxas hasn’t even been in these cities in ages. He could be anywhere now. Sora really had thought his brother was sending those from the city he was staying in, even if it meant he moved around a lot. It was still something, some thin line from one twin to another. Thumbtacks and red strings on a map. 

When Riku graduates, and summer break finally starts for Sora, he finds the next set of postcards in a plastic tupperware bowl inside the old treehouse. Houston, Albuquerque, Boulder. It looks like Roxas is making his way west across the US. Maybe, Sora thinks, huddled up there where they used to play, maybe Roxas’s finally coming home. Maybe he’ll make his way west, like a pioneer, all the way back to California to be with him again. It would be just in time for their birthday. They could turn seventeen together. 

The week of his birthday, Riku is out of town, and Sora doesn’t let himself think that maybe he planned it that way, so there would be no obligation to spend time with his ex. Ex-boyfriend, ex-friend. It’s too confusing to think about. They’d been friends since kindergarten, and now they barely ever talk. Sora, for the millionth time, wishes Roxas was still there with him. Maybe he could give him advice. But more likely, Roxas would tell him how stupid it was to ever date Riku at all. Not only because they were best friends, but because Roxas always thought Riku was a try-hard creep. 

They’ll laugh about it when Roxas comes home. He’ll be so glad Riku and Sora are broken up that he’ll buy them a pizza and a two liter of Coke each to celebrate. 

Every day that week, Sora walks to Riku’s house to check his mail box, like a dead drop. He doesn’t let himself get discouraged on the days there’s nothing. Roxas wouldn’t miss their birthday. He wouldn’t do that to him, not after missing last year’s. 

He doesn’t. The day before their birthday, a postcard is in Riku’s mailbox. Sora is so excited he reads it first. 

“Happy 17th. Miss you.” 

“That’s it?” Sora actually says out loud, to himself, to the empty house, to the postcard in his hands. No ‘see you soon’? Nothing. He flips the card over. Big Ben stares back at him. 

“Cheerio from London.” 

All the air leaves his lungs. His chest aches like he’s dying. If they were born conjoined, they would’ve been fused chest to chest, he thinks, and that’s why this hurts so bad. Everything connecting them is gone. He really thinks he might die here, sobbing, hysterical, at the door to his empty ex’s house, and wouldn’t that be funny? Wouldn’t the police get a kick out of that? Heartbroken gay boy dies while his ex-boyfriend is out of town. Stupid. 

Stupid. 

Stupid. 

Sora packs his bags that night. He wonders if it was this hard for Roxas, choosing what to bring and what to leave. His skateboard would have been obvious, but how did he leave Tigger behind? Sora ends up leaving Pooh just so they won’t be separated too. Clothes, socks, underwear, extra socks, extra underwear. It’s like packing for a vacation, something his family hasn’t done since the twins were twelve. Comb, toothbrush, toothpaste. He’d forgotten those when he was twelve, and his mom complained the whole way there about it. A good backpack. His guitar. He’s not very good, but he can play a few songs, and he thinks being a busker might be fun. The spare key. So Roxas can come home. 

The room is a mess when he’s done, and he looks over it, detached, unable to accept the surreal feeling of his space, minus him - his brother’s space, minus his brother. They’ll be gone. They already are. 

In the kitchen, on a Mickey Mouse notepad, he scratches a note. He tells his mom he’s sorry, that he’ll be back, that he has to find Roxas, but that’s not really true. He’s not looking for Roxas anymore. He wants to find the piece of him that’s gone from his chest. He wants to find that lost thread between them. Mostly, he wants to find Lea, so Sora could tell him just what he took away from him. 

He has almost four hundred dollars in birthday money, and he spends thirteen of that on a bus ticket down to Los Angeles. He leaves before his mom even comes home from work, with the sun setting at his back. He wishes him and Roxas could have hopped on a train together and ridden wherever it went. Hopped on a barge and went across the pacific to China or Japan or Australia. But he boards the bus alone, and Roxas was right. It’s better than dying here.


End file.
